• Department of Energy spending has been a hot topic recently, with Republicans in the House of Representatives supporting a bill to prevent future Solyndra scenarios, but DOE funding has done some good as well.
• Smart Grid looks at five examples of grid innovations out of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that were produced with DOE help.
• The U.S. national laboratory has developed software architecture called GridOPTICS, improved contingency analysis measures, fast dynamic simulation and other tools that could benefit the grid.

From the article:

In light of recent criticism of DOE spending (such as the Solyndra loan), it's nice to come to you with an example of a DOE investment that is paying big dividends.

In September 2011, I told you about Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's GridLAB-D simulator and its graphical contingency analysis tool. Now I'm back to report additional progress from this DOE-funded lab. PNNL is leveraging rich new data streams and high-computing horsepower to create a suite of analytic tools that will deliver new insights to control room operators -- insights that will allow unprecedented grid performance. ...